Who is shooting straight? Making more sense? Not being a dupe?
Not the Uptown paper, which today prints an editorial I am not linking to for fear of catching the stupid. Just more of the same lies and distortions we’ve heard before, naturally entitled Don’t fall for the lies about health reform.
Then we have Camile Paglia, who at last check was not a wholly-owned subsidiary of an insurance company. This, you doubtless have noticed, is fallback argument backers of Obamacare use when the facts turn against them. How can she possibly have problems with the current policy stream?
“The president is promoting the most colossal, brazen bait-and-switch operation since the Bush administration snookered the country into invading Iraq with apocalyptic visions of mushroom clouds over American cities,” Paglia writes. Just so.
And more:
You can keep your doctor; you can keep your insurance, if you’re happy with it, Obama keeps assuring us in soothing, lullaby tones. Oh, really? And what if my doctor is not the one appointed by the new government medical boards for ruling on my access to tests and specialists? And what if my insurance company goes belly up because of undercutting by its government-bankrolled competitor? Face it: Virtually all nationalized health systems, neither nourished nor updated by profit-driven private investment, eventually lead to rationing.
I just don’t get it. Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in three weeks? And why such an abject failure by the Obama administration to present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way? The U.S. is gigantic; many of our states are bigger than whole European nations. The bureaucracy required to institute and manage a nationalized health system here would be Byzantine beyond belief and would vampirically absorb whatever savings Obama thinks could be made. And the transition period would be a nightmare of red tape and mammoth screw-ups, which we can ill afford with a faltering economy.
But Paglia does not seem to understand the transformative power of medical savings accounts, even as she acknowledges them as a new idea. She quickly calls them “pathetically inadequate in a major crisis for anyone earning at or below a median income.” The major crisis is what the high-deductible policy is for, Camille. In fact, I’m convinced that because MSAs and health savings accounts (HSAs) are just starting to change the dynamics of health-care delivery away from a third-party payment system the Left is desperate to stamp them out along with “premium evasion” such savings devices encourage.
But Paglia gets everything else right in ways the Dilworth libs simply never can:
And what do Democrats stand for, if they are so ready to defame concerned citizens as the “mob” — a word betraying a Marie Antoinette delusion of superiority to ordinary mortals. I thought my party was populist, attentive to the needs and wishes of those outside the power structure. And as a product of the 1960s, I thought the Democratic party was passionately committed to freedom of thought and speech.
But somehow liberals have drifted into a strange servility toward big government, which they revere as a godlike foster father-mother who can dispense all bounty and magically heal all ills. The ethical collapse of the left was nowhere more evident than in the near total silence of liberal media and Web sites at the Obama administration’s outrageous solicitation to private citizens to report unacceptable “casual conversations” to the White House. If Republicans had done this, there would have been an angry explosion by Democrats from coast to coast. I was stunned at the failure of liberals to see the blatant totalitarianism in this incident, which the president should have immediately denounced. His failure to do so implicates him in it.
As a libertarian and refugee from the authoritarian Roman Catholic church of my youth, I simply do not understand the drift of my party toward a soulless collectivism. This is in fact what Sarah Palin hit on in her shocking image of a “death panel” under Obamacare that would make irrevocable decisions about the disabled and elderly. When I first saw that phrase, headlined on the Drudge Report, I burst out laughing. It seemed so over the top! But on reflection, I realized that Palin’s shrewdly timed metaphor spoke directly to the electorate’s unease with the prospect of shadowy, unelected government figures controlling our lives. A death panel not only has the power of life and death but is itself a symptom of a Kafkaesque brave new world where authority has become remote, arbitrary and spectral. And as in the Spanish Inquisition, dissidence is heresy, persecuted and punished.
And true to form, it is the end-of-life talk that sends the Uptown paper sputtering around the bend. Its typists insist the legislation under consideration only provides for government-paid “counseling” on end-of-life “tough decisions.” True enough. And to what end? What comes next?
When have you ever known America’s nanny state public health apparatus to leave it at counseling? Did it happen with tobacco, fat, salt, sugar, alcohol, Lawn Darts, bicycle helmets, seat belts, pesticides, herbicides, lead paint, swing-sets, football, baseball, hot dogs, and Chevrolets? The federal government, bent on cost containment and mindful that the last few weeks of life cost tremendous amounts of money to sustain, is simply going to hand out a few pamphlets on hospice and living wills and call it a day?
“Well, we told them their options, the risks and costs involved, all we can do now is respect their decisions.” If you really think that is the only response you’d ever get from a federal end-of-life counselor helping to administer a federal health care system, you are beyond delusional. Much more likely — an absolute cut-off date for federal reimbursement for a feeding tube.
Here’s the kicker, I don’t have a problem with assisted suicide. I think the federal government wrongly spent too much time and energy standing in the of way of Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act and believe that many more states — in addition to Washington — will adopt similar measures because residents want that degree of individual choice in their lives, about their lives.
And that’s the truth.
